Podcast 25: A Parent’s Guide to The Psychology of Video Games

If you’re a parent or somehow otherwise in charge of a diminutive human, there can be a lot of alarming information out there when it comes to children and video games. I know from both doing this website and from being the father of two gamers that everyone has opinions about how games affect kids, what types of games kids should play, how much time kids should spend playing games, and what kinds of dangers lurk on the other side of the screen.

This episode’s returning guest, Dr. Rachel Kowert.

And yet good answers to these questions derived from good science can get lost in the mash of opinion, pseudoscience, and hearsay. This episode’s guest on the podcast aimed to rectify that problem by consolidating research on video games done by psychologists and other academics into an easy to read book targeted at the non technical and not (necessarily) game savvy reader. Those hardcore into games (or science) also find something interesting to hear.

It’s called A Parent’s Guide to Video Games and during the podcast we talk about why she wrote it, how she wrote it, how people have responded to it, and what surprised her.